Perversely, she enjoyed the funeral. Having a definite role, if only for a day, is a luxury. As the widow, as the still young and tragic widow, she dressed the part. The cheval glass confirmed that black suited her far better than bridal white. Knowing this, she already had two perfectly good black dresses. Buying a third was deliberate self indulgence. Women are no longer damned for going hatless into church; all the more reason for choosing black velvet and veiling, no mere wisp, but enough to cover her face. Black dress, black coat, white skin, red hair. Her mother remonstrated when Clare bought black velvet for the now-fatherless Lucy. Clare pointed out that it was an ordinary, off-the-peg child’s party dress: M & S, age 4, machine washable, and reduced, for January. Daniel’s black worsted trousers and white shirt passed without comment. His primary school encouraged uniforms. Clare simply replaced the school burgundy and grey with a plain black tie. She considered explaining to her mother that boys now quite enjoy occasional elegance, but refrained. Instead, she talked carefully about involving the children in the process of mourning, helping them accept the reality of their father’s death. Her mother, head of Religious Education in a Catholic college of education, agreed, complimenting her daughter on a sensible decision. For, if Clare behaved well, made sensible decisions and life choices, it was obviously a reflection of the careful upbringing she had received. This was naturally not the time to admit to her mother, who was also a marriage guidance counsellor, that marrying David at all had been the real tragedy. David, safely dead, was no longer the source of all pain, could cause no more trouble. There was nothing to keep secret now, like a cancer of some unmentionable organ.

It amused Clare to arrange her husband’s funeral in accordance with the rites of Holy Mother Church. In life, the adult David hadn’t cared enough about the faith of his fathers to be called an agnostic or atheist. He hadn’t examined his conscience nor had he agonised, publicly or in private, about his beliefs. To put it simply and accurately, he had lapsed. But the infant David had been baptised, the child in white polyester silk shorts, later worn for football, had made his First Communion, the uniformed schoolboy had been confirmed. He and Clare had married each other in church with the solemn nuptial Mass fitting for a Catholic bride and groom. The two children of this marriage had been baptised. That David himself had long since stopped appearing in church, even at Christmas and Easter wasn’t grounds for consigning him to civic cremation. The careful Jesuit chaplain at the university where Clare taught said, accurately, they had no access to David’s inmost thoughts. The funeral ceremonies, reception of the body into church, followed next day by Requiem Mass, and interment in the Catholic section of the cemetery, were conducted by this priest, Philip Rigby. Clare and her children rarely attended the Catholic parish church. She would explain, to anyone impertinent enough to ask why, that the chaplaincy gave her children a chance to mix with the children of other Catholic staff. Daniel did not attend a Catholic school, ostensibly because the nearest Catholic state school was over six miles away. There was a convent school just up the road, in the heart of their decent suburban village, boys up to seven, girls to eleven. Clare’s parents, who were devout, grieved over Daniel, offered to pay fees. Clare decided to plead her conscience, admit her objection to the continued existence of a private sector in education. It was enough. Jim and Moira didn’t agree, but, political creatures themselves, they respected faith, religious and secular. Privately, Clare’s objection was to segregation rather than mere privilege. She might contemplate a scholarship to Winchester or Eton for her son, but never Ampleforth or Stonyhurst. David, not caring one way or the other, said, if they want to throw their money away, was there any harm in sending Lucy to the convent?

David and his younger brother had always been at different schools. First, the catchment area for his primary school had been arbitrarily altered. Too timid to do battle with the indifferent authorities, his mother had taken one son to the main road, and handed him over to the lollypop man, before turning right, to walk another mile to a different school with five-year old Alan. David’s father, a television engineer, did battle with anyone, whenever he felt like it, but as he didn’t consider the children his business, this arrangement lasted all their childhood. David went to one school, Alan, and in her turn Bridget, going somewhere else. David the alien was systematically bullied by other children, but he had no friends or parents around to notice. The hostility intensified when, at twelve, he won a county scholarship to a minor public school. Possibly, this separate schooling accounted for the strange distance between David and every other member of his family.

Standing in her pew with her two exquisite children, Clare corrected herself. The distance wasn’t simply between David and the rest. All five were entirely separate, merely people who had lived in the same house for a certain number of years, lodgers, not intimates. She could see Alan and his wife, realised that they were strangers whose names she happened to know. Alan, Julia, a card at Christmas, stiff, expensive, overprinted with their address in Weybridge; a card for Lucy’s birth, not coyly pink with a cradle and sentimental verse, but a Chinese watercolour, blank, for special messages. Congratulations, Alan, Julia. Clare remembered that Alan was in business with three contemporaries from the University of Bristol, selling computer time. She wasn’t entirely sure what this involved, but, she was entirely satisfied about Julia’s as yet unannounced pregnancy. Brittle, flat chested Julia must be wearing a 36B bra and her belly was beginning to swell. She had, too that interesting butterfly-shaped pigmentation called the ‘mask of pregnancy’ which intrigues otherwise bored ante-natal staff.

Bridget, third child and only daughter of Leonard and Betty Carradus stood in a row otherwise filled by Clare’s own family. At a funeral, the mourners stand united in their grief, not ushered to opposing sides, as in the divorce court. The last time Clare and Bridget had been in a church together was for Lucy’s baptism, and before that, for Alan and Julia’s wedding. Bridget was a sturdy girl, five foot nine, with coarse, waist-length dark hair; at twenty-four still a postgraduate student working on Romano-British iconography. Clare, with no particular reason to be ashamed of her own degrees, knew that she deferred instinctively to Bridget, scholar, with her predictable First in Greats. Bridget towered over the small Kelly women. She had dressed in her best sub fuse, dramatically black and white to mourn for her dead brother. In Christian churches she took care to behave correctly, though refusing, honourably, to make the sign of the cross. Bridget had become a Buddhist, quietly, shortly after Mods, but David, her brother, was being buried as a Catholic. So be it.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord

and let perpetual light shine upon him…

Daniel knew the words, had learned them by heart, and now spoke them solemnly while gazing at his father’s coffin. Last night, he had read the square silver inscription; his father’s name, date of birth, date of death. Thirty one, nearly thirty two. It sounded quite old, but the Granddads were both seventy, more than twice as old. On the coffin, just below this inscription, there was a little bunch of violets and Christmas roses, ‘with love to Daddy from Daniel and Lucy ‘. He had written that himself, in black and purple felt-tip, ornamenting the message with a pattern of purple ribbons. Lucy, just four, had done well to sign her own wobbly name. It was interesting how clever Lucy was. She could read easy books but she wasn’t ready for prayer book words. Anyway, the flimsy dog-eared funeral mass sheets were boring, without any pictures. Lucy was starting to misbehave, drumming her feet and noisily counting wreaths on the altar steps. Daniel looked up, carefully, to see whether his mother was crying. Hard to tell with the veil like a beekeeper’s, covering her face. Probably not. She cried by herself in her bedroom, with the door locked, which was what he did himself, except his door had no lock. Daniel felt for Clare’s hand and held it tight.

Alan was reading the bidding prayers, a stranger, with some of David’s face; the same eyes, the same seductive cleft chin, the family nose. A different mouth. Ten years ago, Clare thought she wanted the red curves of David’s mouth, full of promise, sex, love, generosity. Now, knowing better, she would choose an Alan, whose mouth was narrow and controlled like her own father’s. Alan was giving nothing away, staring past the black congregation, reading in a voice stripped and cleansed of accent, of any links with the past. Our brother David received in baptism the seeds of eternal life. May he enjoy the company of the saints forever. Then the response, with sounds of unsuppressed tears, Lord, graciously hear us. Alan could have said, my brother David, and ought to know, better than anyone, whether David believed in eternal life or company of saints. Not knowing Alan at all, Clare didn’t know whether he had remained a Catholic. Living so many years with a man who had dropped religion as one drops an unwanted subject at school, she found the faithless normal. Believers were weak-minded or women or both. There were exceptions: her father, both brothers, especially, conspicuously, Richard, last-born sacrifice of Holy Mother Church, the family priest. There was the Pope and all the purple hierarchies but she hadn’t lived day to day with them, sharing a bed, giving birth to their children.

Clare wondered now about the absence of her brothers and sister, though there seemed little enough reason for them to come. Alive, David had ignored their existence. Bernard, the eldest, a pathologist, could not leave his London hospital, might, at this moment, be examining the body of some other victim. His Polish wife, Anna, had written the gently pious letter that came with the Mass card, so very sorry, and so very sorry, too, that she would be in court, wearing her JP hat. Anna and Bernard were with her in spirit. Naturally. Ruth’s absence was no real mystery. She gave nothing away, ever, unless she wanted to, and certainly not her prayers or her time. Better that she should stay away; Ruth would know how little Clare had to mourn. The sisters met rarely now, and wrote only about essentials. As for Richard, who had left father and mother entirely, he was needed in the parish where he was playing curate and called ‘Father’.

David’s mother, Betty, nee O’Connell, born in Galway, might be taken for a Kelly. Her black coat was twenty years old, unconsciously the height of fashion, her black mantilla had been inherited from her own mother, bought from the piety in Tuam Cathedral. Betty had given his generous-seeming mouth but none of her own simplicity or devotion. She made no effort to control her tears, raw, salted furrows down her cheeks, her nose childishly red from days of weeping for her first-born son.

The mass was almost over, Clare noted with interest Alan and Julia both receiving communion. So Julia had become a Catholic. Nothing had been said; perhaps it was in tribute to the coming child. Clare found it incomprehensible. She could not imagine choosing to become a Catholic, nor, herself, choosing any faith.